A series of thoughtful and interesting posts from AmericaBlog on the ENDA crisis. First is this post from John Aravosis of a couple of days ago, followed by a link to this editorial from Bay Windows.
The House is on the verge of passing groundbreaking workplace protections for millions of Americans. It’s the first piece of legislation Congress has seriously considered since the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was passed in 1993 that offers American workers protection from arbitrary firings. It’s not perfect. Few pieces of civil rights legislation are. But it would provide a concrete base upon which to expand ENDA protections not just to transmen and women but to also add provisions to the bill that would require employers to offer domestic partnership benefits to the partners of their LGBT employees if they offer such benefits to their heterosexual employees — a provision that is not in the current bill. As it happens, that’s exactly how Congress dealt with the FMLA. It was a nine-year fight of submitting bills, amending them and persevering through two vetoes of the bill by President George H.W. Bush. The bill that was eventually signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993 was much more comprehensive than the one first approved by Congress. This is not unusual; it’s how the legislative process works.
There is much concern that if a bill protecting employees solely on the basis of sexual orientation is passed then protections for transmen and women will be forgotten. It’s hard to take that concern seriously given the flurry of support that’s been forcefully expressed for trans rights now that we know a trans-inclusive ENDA simply will not pass in the House as its currently configured.
Claiming that Frank has betrayed the trans community, as some are now doing (Los Angeles Times sportswriter Christine Daniels wrote this week that he was engaged in a strategy to “throw the transfolk overboard”) is breathtakingly ignorant of the facts.
The targeting of the Human Rights Campaign for its failure to align itself with the LGBT organizations that have promised to work to defeat a non-inclusive ENDA is equally ignorant of reality. Who can seriously expect the nation’s largest organization working to pass legislation on our behalf to refuse to work with Pelosi and Frank?
This petulant insistence on purity, principle and perfection is a hallmark not just of the LGBT community, but of American politics in general. Just look at James Dobson’s and the Christian right’s demands that the Republican Congress take up an overly broad Federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when a much narrower provision that would have allowed for civil unions stood a much better chance of passage.
Not that I’m comparing progressive LGBT activists with the Christian right. After all, the Christian right is capable of delivering votes, huge sums of money to candidates and hundreds of thousands of phone calls to lawmakers when an issue is deemed important enough to warrant it. Progressive activists? Not so much.
He also publishes a response to his posts from Dana Beyer, a trans activist currently nominated for the board of HRC. Beyer's comments strike me as terrifically slanted and one-sided (the comment about Stonewall being "run by trans women" is only the most egregious example, although the assertion that "gays guys were added to the trans community" with Stonewall is a very close runner-up, particularly since there was no "trans commnity" at the time), and a prime example of the insistence on ideological purity that has effectively neutered the gay left. (I'm not going to comment on the anger in her post. I figure that transpeople are carrying a lot of the same load as gays, and anger is just part of the package. Hell, I'm very angry. I figure I have every right to be.)
Beyer also spends a fair amount of her response claiming that "mainstream" gays are afraid of the gender nonconformity represented by the trans community without once touching on the fact that it is those organizations who are now demanding the full monty on ENDA that repeatedly call for us to tone it down at Pride parades and the like -- the same organizations who are now on the side of the angels in refusing to support the first gay rights bill that might pass Congress. Forgive me if I smell more than a faint whiff of hypocrisy. Sorry, boys and girls, but you're not going to have it both ways here: to say that expressing gender nonconformity is desirable when it is going to kill our chances for federal civil rights legislation but not OK when we're celebrating the range and diversity of our various interlocking communities is one big load of manure. In my opinion, Beyer's full of beans on this one, and she should look to her political allies if she wants to pinpoint whose responsible for this.
A Note: Questioning gender norms has always been part of the gay experience, and it's a very complex historical phenomenon. As a young gay boy growing up before there was such a thing, I had no gay role models. I liked boys; therefore, my only model was women. Fortunately for me, the gay movement started to happen before I'd gotten completely screwed up, and I was able to reconcile being male with wanting males. (Let's hear it for the Information Age!) Also, as I've mentioned before, I count a large number of drag queens, female impersonators, transvestites and even a few transpersons among my friends and acquaintances, and they are not coming from the same place and don't, I think, belong in the same categories. Gender-fuck is one thing; transsexualism is something else entirely, and I seriously question the legitimacy of equating them. This is something that's implicit in a recent post by Chris Crain, where he talks about transgenders and their legal weddings: the point is, transsexuals are not interested in redefining gender, they are interested in moving from one to the other and seem to be quite willing to take on all the definitions of their new identity. Consequently, my attitude toward the conflation of transsexuals and gays is simply that it's a dodge and doesn't indicate anything except a political alliance.
Pam Spaulding has contributed a post discussing the discourse more than the nuts and bolts of strategy, and I think he makes some good points, underscored by Beyer's response and some of the I comments I received in my own posts on this subject: to repeat myself as a foundational statement, "sloppy definitions make sloppy arguments." Nor does backdating terminology convince me of anything -- you simply cannot go back to 1968 and talk about the "gay community" or the "trans community" -- those things didn't exist then, and it's questionable whether we can legitimately point to them as existing now.
One further thing that I think is very relevant to Aravosis' comments on the discourse, and that I think is patently obvious in Beyer's comments and the comments on my own previous posts is the incredible defensiveness of the trans responses, expressed in the finger-pointing that forms such a strong part of their comments. I take this as, in part, a reflection of the PC authoritarianism that forms the foundation of gay left politics, and perhaps also informed by the sneaking suspicion that Barney Frank, John Aravosis, Chris Crain and I are right. Pragmatism and the far left are pretty much strangers, in my experience, and I'm of an age at this point that I would like to see some results, not just more posturing.
Chris Crain also makes a strong point about the "gay leadership" in this issue: they are not in any way representing the community, despite their claims to the contrary. My own reaction to the groups who are demanding all or nothing is that they've once again sold me out. I really wish I were a major donor so I could call Matt Foreman and simply say, "No more money from me."
This is obviously an ongoing issue, so there may be more on it later. What you see here, however, is my thinking as of now.
No comments:
Post a Comment